Lisa Kaltenegger
Carl Sagan Institute, Astronomy & Planetary Science, Cornell University
Research Focus
About Lisa
Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. Her research focuses on exploring new worlds orbiting other stars, especially rocky planets and super-Earths and their atmospheres in the habitable zone. She is a world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint, which can be detected with the next generation of telescopes.
She is part of the IMAX 3D movie “The Search for Life in Space” and gives public lectures e.g. at Aspen Ideas Festival, TED Youth, World Science Festival and the Kavli Foundation lecture at the Adler Planetarium which was live-streamed to 6 continents. Her first book “Are we alone in the universe?” has been published in German and Italian. Asteroid Kaltenegger7734 is named after her.
Honors
America’s Young Innovator in Arts and Science Award, Smithsonian Magazine
Barrie Jones Inaugural Award, British Astrobiology Society & the Open University, UK
Beatrice Tinsley Lectureship, Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand
Christian Doppler Prize for Physics and Innovation in Science, Austria
Fred Kavli Lecture, American Astronomical Society, USA
Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize for Physics of Germany
Kavli Invited Discourse Prize Lecture at IAU General Assembly, Hawaii, USA
Paul Hertelendy Award for Outstanding Young Scientist at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Education
Postdoc
Solar System and Planetary Science/ OIR, 2005 - 2008
Ph.D.
Astronomy, 07/2005
Master's
Astronomy, Karl Franzens Univeristy Graz, 07/1999
Bachelor's
Astronomy, Karl Franzens University Graz, 07/1997
